But that's enough about the weather and cosmic horror
The snow was gone for a whole day and like the entire city came out.
This warm spell just so happened to coincide with my first foray into the tech scene in Montreal: a meetup ostensibly for people interested in the Python programming language. But really, the language choice serves as a bit of a backdrop to talk about all kinds of interesting technology.
In this case, the two talks - both in English this time, but the group is bilingual - revolved around:
- Making it easier to be rude to voice assistants, something I am always in favor of. Specifically how to handle interruptions.
- Terrible death robots
About an hour after I got home from that, we were hit by a snowstorm that would have disabled almost every other city on the continent for weeks.
For most bike paths and major sidewalks, the snow is short lived.
The snow from THAT storm was gone almost instantly thanks to an immediate...call it a heatwave? It was like 50F for an hour. But it stayed warm enough for long enough that it was gone when the sun was blotted from the sky.
We could have seen it from our doorstep but it's worth watching with several thousand people all howling madly at the sky. The applause when the sun returned made me smile in the same way that I smile every time I see this population take an escalator: 100% uptake on standing to the right and climbing on the left. We live in a society.
But that's enough about the weather and cosmic horror. How's the French coming? Well course 1 of 4 is nearly completion.
Same energy.
A lot of people retake the course. So much so that you get six goes at it in total (two re-dos, effectively) before they give up on you. French is a difficult language full of weird rules and even more exceptions. I don't get too worked up over retaking it if necessary because at the end of the day you aren't losing anything. You are spending more time learning French and the material is everywhere.
All that said, I feel pretty good about the finals next week. For now, we have been giving presentations as part of Project Toutou. In principal, this should be something contrived with a doll ("toutou") relating their average day using photoshop or basic staging.
The kids are using image generators objectively correctly and for their sole useful purpose.
Of course there is only one creature I could even consider to do such a presentation on.
